Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam

By Raymond Ibrahim

A riveting account of the lives and epic battles of eight Western defenders against violent Islamic jihad that sheds much-needed light on the enduring conflict with radical Islam.

In Defenders of the West, the author of Sword and Scimitar follows up with vivid and dramatic profiles of eight extraordinary warriors—some saints, some sinners—who defended the Christian West against Islamic invasions. Discover the real Count Dracula, Spain’s El Cid, England’s Richard Lionheart, and many other historical figures, whose true and original claim to fame revolved around their defiant stance against jihadist aggression. Defenders of the West is an instructive and inspiring read. Whereas Sword and Scimitar revolved around decisive battles, Defenders of the West revolves around decisive men.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bombardier Books
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642938210

Raymond Ibrahim

Raymond Ibrahim, an expert in Islamic history and doctrine, is the author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). He has appeared on C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and PBS, and been published by the New York Times Syndicate, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Weekly Standard, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. Formerly an Arabic linguist at the Library of Congress, Ibrahim has guest lectured at many universities, including the U.S. Army War College, briefed governmental agencies such as U.S. Strategic Command, and testified before Congress. He has been a visiting fellow/scholar at a variety of Institutes—from the Hoover Institution to the National Intelligence University—and is currently a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

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© 2022 by Raymond Ibrahim

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Contents

Foreword by Victor Davis Hanson

Introduction

Chapter 1: Duke Godfrey: Defender of Christ’s Sepulchre

Chapter 2: The Cid: Lord and Master of War

Chapter 3: King Richard: The Lion that Roared at Islam

Chapter 4: Saint Ferdinand: Savior of Spain

Chapter 5: Saint Louis: Christ’s Tragic Hero

Chapter 6: John Hunyadi: The White Knight of Wallachia

Chapter 7: Skanderbeg: The Albanian Braveheart

Chapter 8: Vlad Dracula: The Dread Lord Impaler

Conclusion

Works Cited

Endnotes

To all the Past, Present, and Future Defenders of that which is Good, Right, and True.

Foreword

by Victor Davis Hanson

Raymond Ibrahim is well known for translating and editing the mostly unknown writings and communiques of Osama bin Laden and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri in The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). In the post-9/11 climate, Ibrahim revealed to Western readers the sharp dichotomy between the terrorists’ filtered Islamism that appeared in English, and the fiery jihadism they spoke and composed in Arabic to inflame their own constituencies.

In the following years Ibrahim focused on yet another little known but increasingly worsening tragedy—the systematic oppression of Christian minorities throughout the Islamic world, culminating with his book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013).

With Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018), Ibrahim offered an analysis on how and why for nearly a millennium-and-a-half, the Islamic world and the West fought so violently and seemingly endlessly—and why outmanned Western militaries in often far-off, hostile theaters were able to persevere due to superior technology, logistics, and organization. In so doing, Ibrahim was returning to the same academic focus he had over a quarter of a century earlier as a university student, when he and I first met in the mid-1990s and I eventually became his MA thesis advisor on the first major military encounter between the Christian West and Islamic East, the Battle of Yarmuk.

Now in Defenders of the West, Ibrahim revisits these historical themes of West-East adversity. But he focuses on individuals—specifically eight important Christian warriors who fought Islamic armies in various iterations of nearly endless conflict.

Some are familiar names, known from Hollywood epics (El Cid and Richard the Lionheart). A few survive in sensationalized form in popular culture (Vlad the Impaler, now more popularly Dracula). Others may be vaguely recognized by eponymous place names in America and Europe (St. Louis and San Fernando). And yet the most impressive are now mostly unknown to contemporary readers (Godfrey of Bouillon, John Hunyadi, and Skanderbeg).

Even so, for centuries, all were canonized in the West for their largely successful roles in beating back Islamic invasions of Europe or reversing Islamic occupations of lands of the former Roman Empire, in the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans, and the Holy Land. Such Western-centric characterizations may seem controversial today, given both the postmodern mood of Western society, the later nineteenth/twentieth century European colonial and imperial occupational presence in the Mideast and North Africa, and, more recently, the successful propaganda of radical Islamists, ranging from Osama bin Laden to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, concerning how the West today illegitimately occupies or controls land still belonging to various caliphates and sultanates of the past.

Ibrahim’s biographical theme is that all these quite diverse European leaders saw themselves as defenders not just of religion alone, but of a civilization antithetical to those of their enemies. In what now may seem an archaic sensibility, they were fighting for a unique way of life—or often a restoration of it—against a rising challenge completely foreign to everything in their experience, from the aspirations voiced on the Sermon of the Mount to Classical traditions of individual liberty.

In this and past books, Ibrahim sees the strife between the West—formerly though now anachronistically called Christendom, given its widespread agnosticism and atheism—and Islam as unending. The tenets of these two religions, he posits, have for centuries been seen as incompatible, given that Western pacifism has no counterpart in the Koran and the Hadith. Yet the postmodern attractions of globalism and materialism, combined with Western-style consensual government and free-market capitalism, make it ever more difficult to convince affluent and leisured Western publics that many leaders in the Islamic world have never dropped its ancient ideas of jihad. Few now comprehend that many in the Muslim world want no part of a Westernized end-of-history or ecumenical vision of global harmonization. And those that do partake in Western consumer capitalism often blame the purveyors, not the consumers, of such addictive materialism.

So, there is a political as well as historical message in these military biographies of the wartime careers of Christian resistance leaders to Islam. They were realists who saw defeat as a guarantee of extinction—and even victory as a brief reprieve against a dynamic Eastern ideology that demanded either their conversion, submission, or annihilation.

Mutatis mutandis, Ibrahim argues that these men’s careers can still offer some guidance in a far more dangerous modern world of nuclear, biological, and economic warfare—in which the Khomeinist regime of Iran boasts of an impending nuclear destruction of democratic Israel; the moribund Islamic State and its sub-Saharan offshoots institutionalize beheadings and promise a new caliphate to launch attacks against Westerners; imams brag of demography as destiny as the European population shrinks and the Muslim immigrant community grows; and a loosely organized group of post-al-Qaeda terrorists still intimidates Western writers, film directors, journalists, and political officials to censor themselves—and others—even within their own supposedly free Western societies.

Post-9/11 long lines at airport security checkpoints, the endemic Western fear of referring to Mohammed in the deprecatory fashion habitually accorded to Christ, and the one-way immigrations to Western nations from Muslim countries, for Ibrahim, all follow historical and predictably asymmetrical patterns. It is within this larger landscape that Ibrahim expresses sympathy for the eight defenders, whose own fierceness would today be written off by most of their Western descendants as abject fanaticism and cruelty.

Ibrahim’s eight heroes fought in three great iterations of this perennial rivalry—the Crusades, the Reconquista, and the battles in Eastern Europe to deflect Ottoman advances—with mixed successes, given their smaller numbers, internal religious schisms, and political differences. We sometimes forget that at the high tide of the Ottoman Caliphate, Islam was imperial and for centuries mostly united. In contrast, late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe was splintered into Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, and relied on new transatlantic exploration routes as a way of bypassing or altogether escaping rather than confronting the Ottoman threat in the east.

The Iberian Peninsula, along with most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, eventually reclaimed their earlier Western and Christian pedigrees, while the Middle East, after the nihilist Fourth Crusade, gradually reverted to pre-Crusader Islamism and later Ottomanization. Yet another subtext of Ibrahim’s biographies are the contributions of these little remembered leaders in leaving lasting legacies. After all, without some of them, there was no inherent reason why Muslim Albania should not have become the current model for all Eastern Europe. Why is the contemporary southern Iberian Peninsula a part of Europe rather than of Morocco? And why are there still slivers of Westernism in Lebanon and the state of Israel?

It would be easy to caricature Ibrahim as an ideologue offering up propaganda to a diminishing number of Christian readers—except that he is not and for several reasons. One, he is an accomplished historian; two, he is a Coptic-Egyptian-American with long familial roots and experience in the Middle East; and, most importantly, he is a linguist. His academic training in classical and Byzantine Greek, his fluency in Arabic and deep knowledge of classical Arabic texts, and his familiarity with canonical medieval Latin chronicles have resulted in a book that cites and quotes hundreds of contemporary sources, some little known, thus allowing Ibrahim to assess secondary scholarship by firsthand knowledge of primary texts.

Although he quotes warnings about Islamic agendas from several Western luminaries—Hilaire Belloc, Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill—Ibrahim’s use of contemporary Muslim sources best characterizes the asymmetry, not just between the divergent mores of Islam and Christianity, but also in the vast differences between the freedom to criticize and the fear to dissent. If Western leaders are now embarrassed by five-hundred-year-old fiery and fierce expressions of their ancestors’ resistance to Islam, many influential Muslims still take pride in reading about the roots of their own ongoing jihad. So, from Ibrahim’s careful documentation of both primary and secondary sources, there emerges a candor about Islamic violent chauvinism. If contemporary Westerners are today ashamed of their past militarists who saw themselves as saviors of Christendom, most Muslims share no such self-doubt. Islam worries not so much over the methods of those who fought the West but far more whether the ends that justified them were achieved.

In his concluding chapter, Ibrahim sees Western self-inquiry as a positive, but he notes that it often can devolve into license and nihilism. And in the current mood, whether in academic circles or popular culture, Western browbeating manifests itself in virtue-signaling damnation of Western civilization—while quite timidly practicing self-censorship, or keeping silent, about Islamic pathologies‚ including those, ironically, most illiberal to race and gender, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Again, Ibrahim is not really a polemicist; he is a historian who wishes to retell the often-forgotten military careers of an extraordinary group of great captains. He reflects many themes from his past work, including by emphasizing the dependence of Western troops on shock, technology, and the Classical military tradition, pitted against the Islamic reliance on missiles, and indirect and more mobile warfare. In his chapters on the Cid and Skanderbeg, modern readers may find incomprehensible the physical suffering, courage, and ordeal that both endured from near constant warring.

After the failures of the Crusades to recapture Jerusalem, and the success of the Reconquista, it soon became ever more difficult to enlist papal and Western European kingdoms in the defense of Christendom. Their factionalism, their distance from Istanbul, and their growing interest in the New World diluted their attentions to the dangers threatening Eastern Europe. I once asked a middle-aged Greek friend why he harbored such hostility to Roman Catholicism and Western Europe; without hesitation he answered, We paid the price for keeping the Turks out of Western Europe. By we he meant that fellow Greeks of five hundred years past were near living entities. By price he inferred the now less dynamic economies of the frontline nations of Eastern Europe.

Similarly, Ibrahim notes that many of these Christian generals are still revered in Eastern Europe, precisely because these countries have for centuries been garrison states, whether facing Ottoman invasions or more modern threats from imperial, communist, and now Putin’s Russia, or their sense of ingratitude or even betrayal from their Western kin. They have no margin of error in their defense calculations, given that they have always lived on the proverbial edge of Europe without a vast ocean of protection, far distant from the Americas, and more proximate to the centers of Islam. If Hungarians, Poles, Romanians, and Serbs continue to see eternal threats to their precariousness, whereas Western Europeans envision the advantages of open-borders immigration and a more diverse society, it may well be because their respective histories—and current geographies—are so different.

In the end, Defenders of the West is engaging storytelling of fascinating people and forgotten events at its best. Although anchored in arcane or archaic texts, it reads and flows like an adroitly crafted novel, buttressed by a scholarship that allows those of the past to speak for the past. And it recaptures a mentality now long buried in the West—that its defenders never demanded perfection to justify their sacrifices, but simply trusted that their cause was far preferrable to an unendurable alternative.

Victor Davis Hanson

The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

December 29, 2021

He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.

—Jesus Christ (Luke 22:36)

Like a trampled spring and a polluted well is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked.

—Proverb 25:26

Praise be the Lord my Rock. He trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.

—Psalm 144:1

Introduction

It is especially pleasing to the living…when the deeds of brave men (particularly of those serving as soldiers of God) are either read from writings or soberly recounted from memory….

—Fulcher of Chartres (c. 1100)¹

To understand the nature and purpose of this book, a brief recap of its 2018 predecessor is required, for the two books very much complement one another. In keeping with its subtitle, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West documented the perennial conflict between the two civilizations; it showed how from its inception in the seventh century, Islam identified itself in contradistinction to Christianity—God does not beget nor is he begotten! the Koran thunders (112:3) ²—and became the chief adversary of the West, then known as Christendom.

Between especially the seventh and seventeenth centuries, an array of Muslim peoples (beginning with Arabs and Berbers, ending with Turks and Tatars), waged one devastating jihad after another on Christians. As a result, three-quarters of the original Christian world, including the older, richer, and more developed regions—namely, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia Minor (now Turkey)—were permanently conquered and Islamized.³ Seen as the final bastion of Christianity—the final infidel holdout—Muslims continuously bombarded Europe, or the West (so named for literally being the westernmost appendage of what was once a much larger civilizational block that Islam permanently severed). In the words of Bernard Lewis,

For almost a thousand years, from the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna, Europe was under constant threat from Islam. In the early centuries it was a double threat—not only of invasion and conquest, but also of conversion…. All but the easternmost provinces of the Islamic realm had been taken from Christians…. North Africa, Egypt, Syria, even Persian-ruled Iraq, had been Christian countries, in which Christianity was older and more deeply rooted than in most of Europe. Their loss was sorely felt and heightened the fear that a similar fate was in store for Europe…. It was this fear, more than any other single factor, which led to the beginning of Arabic scholarship in Europe [in keeping with the dictum, know your enemy].⁴

In between the millennium separating Islam’s invasions of Spain and Vienna, from 711 to 1683, virtually every corner of Europe—as far as distant Iceland—was pummeled and savaged in the name of jihad with untold millions of Europeans slaughtered or, often worse, enslaved.⁵ Few now can comprehend the traumatic impact this had on Europe’s development. As historian Franco Cardini puts it, If we…ask ourselves how and when the modern notion of Europe and the European identity was born, we realize the extent to which Islam was a factor (albeit a negative one) in its creation. Repeated Muslim aggression against Europe [over the centuries]…was a ‘violent midwife’ to Europe.⁶

Nor was the United States of America spared; its very first wars as a nation—the Barbary Wars (1801–1805; 1815)—were against Muslim slavers. Years earlier, when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with and asked one of Barbary’s ambassadors why his coreligionists were raiding U.S. vessels and enslaving American sailors, the Muslim relied on the same exact logic that the Muslims who had savaged Europe for over a millennium had always relied on: The ambassador answered us, the Framers of the Constitution wrote to Congress in a letter dated March 28, 1786, that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that…it was their right and duty to make war upon them [all non-Muslims] wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners….⁷

This, of course, is a near perfect paraphrase of that one Koran verse most associated with jihad, 9:5: Kill the idolaters [non-Muslims] wherever you find them—capture them, besiege them, and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush.

The same nineteenth century that witnessed the Barbary Wars also witnessed the meteoric rise of Western power and concomitant nose-dive of Muslim power, so that by the early twentieth century, what was once a constant threat became a forgotten nightmare. By 1922, the last standing and long moribund Islamic power—the Ottoman Empire, for centuries, the scourge of Europe—died, and Turkey became a secular republic.

Even so, those few Europeans able to rise above the myopic triumphalism surrounding them continued to appreciate, not only the historic life and death struggle the West had experienced with Islam, but its existential and permanent nature. Writing around 1938—at the absolute peak of European power and nadir of Islamic power—European historian Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) made the following prescient observation:

Millions of modern people of the white civilization—that is, the civilization of Europe and America—have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past…. In Islam there has been no dissolution of ancestral doctrine—or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa. The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed—but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.⁸

While Belloc’s warnings were widely dismissed as hyperbolic—well into the 1970s, ivy league scholars were still convinced that Islam, like Western Christianity, had become obsolete, a mere outer trapping—today his words seem prophetic. After all, since Belloc penned them nearly a century ago, not only has the West forgotten about Islam; it has become sympathetic to this creed that for over a millennium terrorized and negatively impacted the West’s development.

Conversely, not only does Islam continue to exhibit its historic hostility; it continues reasserting itself all around the world—including if not especially against the West: the Taliban, an Islamic extremist group, which the U.S. spent much by way of blood and treasure to declare victory against twenty years ago, is back in power in Afghanistan (with billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. weapons to boot); Iran, which is driven by apocalyptic visions and eschatological dreams of the jihadist kind, is close to becoming a nuclear power; millions of Muslim refugees are flooding the West, especially Europe, where they overtly and especially covertly continue the work of their jihadist ancestors, either by engaging in bouts of thuggery, violence, and outright terrorism or, more commonly, by subverting the continent’s identity; and Christian minorities throughout the Islamic world are being oppressed and killed in ways reminiscent of the great era of Christian persecution under Rome—though the legacy media keeps all of these inconvenient facts suppressed. Everywhere the threat is real and palpable, even as a somnolent if not comatose West slumbers on.

The words of British statesman, Winston Churchill (1874–1965)—who once likened religiosity in Muslims to rabies in dogs⁹—seem pertinent here:

[I]f you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.¹⁰

Such words underscore the grand irony: Islamic advances and Western retreats are currently happening when the West’s might vis-à-vis Islam is at an all-time high. As one historian put it back in 2006, At a time when the military superiority of the West—meaning chiefly the USA—over the Muslim world has never been greater, Western countries feel insecure in the face of the activities of Islamic terrorists…. In all the long centuries of Christian-Muslim conflict, never has the military imbalance between the two sides been greater, yet the dominant West can apparently derive no comfort from that fact.¹¹

What explains this strange and ironic dichotomy? What did the West’s past possess that its present—which seems to be far superior in every conceivable way, including militarily—does not? The answer is men who had something worth fighting for—from their faith and family, to their countries and cultures.

And that is what this book is about: eight men who, driven by something greater than themselves, devoted much of their lives and went to great lengths—most of them died in their forties or fifties—to make a militant if not desperate stand against Islamic aggression.¹² (The epic natures of their conflicts are such that, by the close of this book, the reader may well wonder why—though the Conclusion will explain precisely why—the lives of these men have not been turned into blockbuster movies.¹³)

As intrinsically rewarding as it may be to read heroic biographies, focusing on and drawing lessons from heroes was, in fact, once a serious and well regarded historical endeavor. One modern school of thought maintains that The history of the world is but the biography of great men, to quote British philosopher of history, Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881). Much—not least much-needed inspiration—could be gained by studying these shakers and movers, argued Carlyle: Great men, taken up in any way, are profitable company, he wrote. We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him.¹⁴

This view came at a time when its antithesis—that material and economic factors were the only molders of history—was making deep inroads in the historical method. Of its practitioners—especially its chief advocate, whose name would become conflated with it, Karl Marx (1818–1883)—Carlyle was unsympathetic: Such small critics [of great men] do what they can to promote unbelief and universal spiritual paralysis, he charged.¹⁵ Projection explained the rejection: No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

To be sure, Carlyle and his allies did not reject the importance of material and mundane factors; rather, they likened them to dry dead sticks, always present, idly littering the floor until that rare man of genius or courage ignites them into an epoch-making conflagration. The British thinker wrote as much in the context of lamenting the creeping dominance of the materialist worldview of history: I am well aware…[that] this is an age that denies great men—denies the desirableness of great men…. There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual lightning [individual actors], with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel [material factors]. It is the last consummation of unbelief.¹⁶

Be that as it may; above and beyond the fact that this book approaches history as biography—the value of which is ultimately for the reader to decide—the non-biographical lessons it offers are significant.

First, the history contained herein has been intentionally ignored or suppressed because it directly gives the lie to the popular, mainstream mantra that Islam is a perpetually misunderstood—including by its own practitioners—religion of peace. As mentioned, and as the coming pages will further demonstrate, right from Islam’s birth, Muslims and Christians became entangled in a perennial, nonstop war—punctuated only by the exigencies of realpolitik and other practical considerations that modern day academics inordinately emphasize and exploit to substantiate their pro-Islamic theses.

The following history further demonstrates that premodern Christians understood—the educated classes explicitly, the masses implicitly or just instinctively—that, whatever their label, national designation, or temporal iteration, Islamic polities were inherently hostile. Consider how Konstantin Mihailović—a fifteenth century Serb who was forced to convert to Islam and made to fight as a slave-soldier for the Turks until he escaped—conflated the main enemies of Christendom: the Persians, the Turks, the Tatars, the Berbers, and the Arabs; and the diverse Moors…[all] conduct themselves according to the accursed Koran, that is, the scripture of Mohammed.¹⁷

Another useful aspect of this book is that it offers a close and colorful look at the important differences between the Western and Islamic ways of war—elements of which are still evident today.

Before proceeding, yet another irony concerning the West’s past and present needs accounting for: irrespective of what any professional historian thought, the eight men profiled in this book were for centuries held by their respective posterities as iconic exemplars of heroism and self-sacrifice; today, however, they are largely seen by their Western descendants as embarrassments—exemplars only of the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, xenophobia, and, of course, racism. How and why such a change came about is more fully explored in this book’s conclusion.

For now, addressing the greatest factor behind this dramatic turn in opinion should suffice: although the Christian faith of this book’s Defenders was, as will become very clear early on, central to their desperate and defiant stance against Islam, it is precisely their descendants and coreligionists—namely, contemporary Western Christians—who are most prone to denouncing these men who fought and died for their faith as unworthy of the name Christian. Rather ironically, such modern day Christians fail to realize that without their ancestors’ sacrifices, they themselves would very likely be Muslims today (as most of the descendants of the once fiercely Christian Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey are today).

One reason for this conundrum should be obvious enough: because the overwhelming majority of warfare between Islam and Western Europe occurred in the thousand years before the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, almost all¹⁸ of this book’s Defenders were adherents of the only form of Christianity then recognizable: what is today called Catholicism—that is, what is today looked upon with deep suspicion, and worse, by most Western Christians.

Put differently, whatever improvements the Reformation may have led to, it also created a discontinuity in and—perhaps more importantly—how Christian history is understood (including against its most formidable and persistent enemy). Everything preceding the Reformation—meaning the first fifteen centuries of Christian history—was and often continues to be seen through a jaundiced lens, especially the notion of violence, or holy war, on behalf of Christendom, and those who advocated it—which naturally includes this book’s eight men.

Worse, the evolution of Christianity from its premodern to modern to now postmodern forms has created insurmountable ruptures between the past and present that now transcend and have little to do with the traditional Catholic/Protestant divide. In other words, a great many Catholics—indeed, mainstream Catholicism itself, particularly as defined under the current pope and in keeping with the predominant spirit of the age, or geist—disavow their heritage and its heroes as much as if not more so than their Protestant counterparts.

None of this, of course, tells us if these eight eminently violent men were—as some inquisitive readers may be wondering—true Christians. Nor, happily, is it for me to say who was or wasn’t a Christian—or saved, or born again, or had a personal relationship with Jesus, to use Evangelical terms the contemporary significance of which would have been unintelligible and therefore anachronistic to at least the first 1.5 millennia of Christian history. Instead, I hereby focus on those aspects of Christianity that are both answerable and germane to this book. (Incidentally and for full disclosure: I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a Catholic or a Protestant, and am merely endeavoring to call it as I see it).

For starters, it must be understood that premodern Christianity was for at least the first three-quarters of its existence a muscular religion: not only does recorded history, including the forthcoming one, make this abundantly clear; vestiges of the glories of Christendom still surround us. Consider the impulse of faith that erected so many massive if not imposing cathedrals and churches all throughout Europe. Once thundering with the booming, masculine voices of confident worshippers, they are today the haunt of little old ladies lighting candles for their departed loved ones—that is, when such buildings are not actively being pawned off or donated (in the name of Christian charity) to Muslims who transform them into mosques.

Much of this evolution revolves around the modern Christian penchant to internalize the faith and express it only in passive, never active, terms. From here, one begins to understand the modern Christian aversion to the seemingly oxymoronic notion of Christian warriors—an aversion that cries, But Christians must always turn the other cheek!

In reality, many centuries before Islam burst onto the scene, Christian theologians had concluded that the so called charity texts of the New Testament that preached passivism and forgiveness, not retaliation, were firmly defined as applying to the beliefs and behavior of the private person [and not the state], to quote Crusades historian Christopher Tyerman.¹⁹

Christ himself—who called on his followers to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s (Matt. 22:21)—differentiated between the social and spiritual realms. In the only recorded instance of Jesus being slapped, he did not offer his other cheek but rather challenged his slapper to explain himself (John 18:22–23). The Nazarene further praised a Roman centurion without calling on him to repent by resigning from one of the most brutal militaries in world history (Matt. 8: 5–13). Similarly, when a group of soldiers asked John the Baptist how they should repent, he advised them always to be content with their army wages (Luke 3:14)—and said nothing about their quitting the Roman army.

This is because there was no intrinsic contradiction in a doctrine of personal, individual forgiveness condoning certain forms of necessary public violence to ensure the security in which, in St. Paul’s phrase, Christians ‘may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty’ (1 Tim. 2:2).²⁰ Or in the words of that chief articulator of Just War theory, Saint Augustine (354–430), It is the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty to wage war.²¹ Crusades historian Jonathan Riley-Smith elaborates:

What was evil in war itself? Augustine had asked. The real evils were not the deaths of those who would have died anyway, but the love of violence, cruelty, and enmity; it was generally to punish such that good men undertook wars in obedience to God or some lawful authority…. Expeditions to the Levant, North Africa, or the Iberian Peninsula could be justified as responses to present Muslim aggression or as rightful attempts to recover Christian territory which had been injuriously seized in the past.²²

Perhaps a more difficult idea to fathom—yet one pivotal to understanding nearly half of this book—is that premodern Christian notions of self-defense transcended today’s boundaries: not only were conquered territories and peoples to be liberated; so too were sacred sites. From here, one begins to appreciate why Jerusalem and the Holy Land had a primacy of importance in medieval minds that is scarcely conceivable to moderns—and hence why the Crusades were every bit as defensive as the wars of liberation in Spain and the Balkans were.²³

Premodern Christians were also much more familiar with and moved by the logic of righteous warfare contained in the Jewish scriptures (the Christian Old Testament) than their modern counterparts. In 1217, for example, a Crusades preacher paraphrased Lamentations 5:2—Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to foreigners—to express Christian outrage that the Holy Land and its many sacred sites were in Muslim hands: the Land of Promise is our inheritance and the place where Christ was buried and suffered is our home. And this inheritance is given into the hands of [Muslim] gentiles…. Now our holy inheritance is seized; the holy places are profaned; the holy cross is made a captive.²⁴

In short and from the start, mainstream Christian teaching has always supported violence and war for just causes—repulsing an enemy or reclaiming conquered territory or sacred spots from him. Violence itself was always seen as a neutral means to a desired—meaning, just—end. In this light, none of this book’s eight Defenders can be accused of being un-Christian for their wars against Muslims, though that is, of course, the chief reason that they are. As the popular pseudo-historian Karen Armstrong once chided, During the 12th Century, Christians were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims, even though Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them.²⁵ No word, of course, that it was Muslims who had initiated these brutal holy wars and first began to exterminate Christians or that the Crusaders were trying to protect their coreligionists.

At any rate, the point here is less about correct Christian doctrine—which one may argue has also been reformed in recent centuries—and more about correct Christian history. As Riley-Smith observes,

The issue I have with these leading representatives of the consensus [that Christian holy wars were a betrayal of Christian teaching] relates not to their theology but to their knowledge of history, because underlying their opinions is the belief that the crusading movement was an aberration, a departure from the norm in Christian history. This is wish-fulfillment, stemming from a desire to reshape the past of one’s religion into a more acceptable form. As recently as the seventeenth century, and perhaps more recently still, most Christians—Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant—had in general no problem with the idea of holy war.²⁶

Indeed, virtually no major religion—apparently not even Buddhism²⁷—has a problem with the idea of holy war. (Any premodern religion that might have is now naturally extinct.) As such, although the Defenders of this book fought for the historic faith of their European homeland—Christianity—people of all religions can now respect, if not draw inspiration from, the firm conviction and implacable determination that drove them to fight tooth and nail against Islamic aggression, which other non-Christian civilizations have done and continue to do.

In short and for our purposes, any Defender who identified himself as Christian and defined his conflict with Islam as on behalf of Christianity—as did all eight men profiled in the coming pages—was, by my standards, deemed eligible for inclusion in this book on Christian heroes. Readers unsatisfied with such simple but ascertainable criteria are welcome to take it upon themselves to determine whether these men were true Christians above and beyond the facts of recorded history.

A word on the selection process—deciding which Defenders to profile. The ultimate consideration was innate. I have long thought that these eight men and their wars with Islam deserve sufficient presentation. Proof of this is evident in the fact that, although it would have been more ideal to include men of widely different backgrounds, times, and places—there are, after all, nearly fourteen centuries to cull from—two of my eight selections were first cousins and another three were acquainted contemporaries.

Despite such seeming parochialism, the general story of the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, the high age of Christian resistance, is amply told in the following pages, as all eight chapters focus on the three main theaters of war: the Holy Land (three chapters), Spain (two chapters), and the Balkans (three chapters).

That only eight men made it through the selection process does not reflect a dearth of heroes but rather practical considerations. First, figures from before the eleventh century are generally so underrepresented in the historical record that they were disqualified from consideration. This is not to say that men such as Charles Martel, Leo III the Isaurian, and Charlemagne do not warrant inclusion, but that there is simply not enough primary source information to do them justice in a full chapter. For these and other heroes of early Christendom, readers are directed to Chapters 1–3 of Sword and Scimitar.

Relatedly, because this book and its predecessor have such a strong synergy and affinity to one another—they are in fact best seen as companion books—those many Defenders who received adequate coverage in Sword and Scimitar were excluded from consideration: faced with a fresh blank page, I much preferred to write and offer something new rather than rehash and paraphrase something old. As such, men that might have warranted inclusion in this book but already received a fair bit of mention in Sword and Scimitar—I especially have in mind Nikephoros II Phocas, Don Juan of Austria, and Jan Sobieski—were also passed over to make room for the others.

This leads to perhaps the primary difference between this and that book: the men who appeared in Sword and Scimitar were connected to its main theme—decisive battles. In reality, however, great heroes are defined by their courage, commitment, and self-sacrifice irrespective of actual victory on the battlefield, which, as even Carlyle acknowledged, was often a byproduct of several other factors beyond their control. As such, there is, happily, little overlap in the histories contained in these two books. For whereas Sword and Scimitar is about decisive battles, this book is about decisive men, meaning it has less to do with historical outcome and more to do with the human heart—something the West is sorely lacking these days.

A final word on sources: The reader will quickly note that I quote liberally if not voluminously from the primary sources of history, the earliest and most original accounts written by both Christians and Muslims, most of them contemporaneous with their subjects. (Of this book’s more than twelve hundred endnote citations, the majority are primary sources.) I chose this approach for two main reasons.

First, primary sources contain information that is, as they say, from the horse’s mouth. While it is true that they should not be accepted uncritically, all subsequent (secondary) histories must, if they wish to be taken seriously, trace back to and at least grapple with the original writings on their subjects, for that is where it all begins.

Instead, many popular histories, documentaries, and movies, especially in the last few decades, have ignored if not downright contradicted much of what these primary sources relay. As for scholarly secondary histories, and as I for one have learned over the decades, no matter how well credentialed or esteemed a modern academic may be, their histories—and even translations and direct quotes therein—sometimes do not agree, even if in subtle but important ways, with the primary sources they purport to trace back to.²⁸ Still more vexing is when such writers, behaving as if they are not to be questioned over trifles, do not even bother to cite their sources—the reader is to accept everything at face value, on the fallacy of authority.

Unsuspecting readers may well assume that whatever these new histories dismiss deserves to be dismissed—being, say, an obvious byproduct of medieval superstition or propaganda unworthy of mention. All too often, however, the creators of such histories ignore or gloss over precisely those things they simply do not like, not least because they contradict the theses—that Islam is a religion of peace or that the Crusades were unjust wars of European colonialism—they may be trying to peddle.

Moreover, because primary sources often do indeed contain information that invariably strikes the modern reader as unintelligible (and therefore better ignored without any further ado), readers have naturally become that much more receptive or susceptible to such ideologically-charged histories. After all, unlike the original sources,

Reviews for Defenders of the West

[George Kochanowski · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Defenders is written in a unique way as the author immediately cites references from the period of the topic, and usually both sides of the conflict described. If you need to know why Richard was called Lionheart this book will answer that question. Well done, to say the least...!